It ended up being a joke, and took only about 10 minutes.

The guy before me took 2 hours. He said it was pretty tough when he got out.

The examiner is a self-proclaimed redneck with cowboy boots. Generally a jolly fellow who appears to have been giving check rides for quite some time. When he met us that morning, he asked if we knew how to spell success. “S-U-C-C-E-S-S,” my classmate said. “Nope. Not even close. S-C-O-T-C-H.”

I started by filling out a weight and balance form from a dispatch release. I realized I’d messed up when I went to plot the CG of the zero fuel weight, and got an index off the chart forward. About that time, the examiner walked back in, looked at me looking at my form, laughed, said, “I know what you did wrong!” “How could you know that quickly?” I asked. “You used basic operating weight in pounds, not adjusted weight units.” I fixed it, and he asked me some questions off the dispatch release. I didn’t know what the first two things he asked about were, but got the rest. He seemed content and got out the study guide I’d made. “Oh, you got my study guide?” I asked. “You made this?” “Yup.” He talked about how it was pretty good. I told him there were a few errors on it, and asked if he wanted an updated copy. “Oh, yes, please!” I emailed it to him right there. “Well, shit, if you made this damn thing there’s no point in me asking you questions off of it. What am I going to ask you now?”

He spent a couple minutes asking me General Operating Manual questions, but after I was able to rattle off the answers quickly, he decided I knew that and went to the walk around slides. There were 160 redundant slides in a power-point presentation. He started going through them. “These slides are bullshit,” he said, “I can’t stand them. 20 pictures of the same damn thing, and it’s not even the right airplane–look that’s a 700.” He stopped at a few points and asked some preflight questions. Asked a lot of questions like, “Can this thing be missing?” To which I answer, “I don’t know, but if it were, I would consult the CDL and notify the Captain.” “Yeah, yeah,” he’d say, interrupting my totally correct but useless answer, “No that thing can’t be missing…. Here, what’s that for?” After another couple minutes of that, he spent awhile printing out paperwork for my training folder, marked me down as “Oral complete,” and sent me home.